Archimedes Palimpsest - Overview

Overview

Archimedes lived in the 3rd century BC, and a copy of his work was made around 950 AD in the Byzantine Empire by an anonymous scribe. In 1229 the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book. The erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes' work is now readable after scientific and scholarly work from 1998 to 2008 using digital processing of images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray.

In 1906 it was briefly inspected in Istanbul by the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg. With the aid of black-and-white photographs he arranged to have taken, he published a transcription of the Archimedes text. Shortly thereafter Archimedes' Greek text was translated into English by T. L. Heath. Before that it was not widely known among mathematicians, physicists or historians. It contains:

• "On the Equilibrium of Planes"
• "Spiral Lines"
• "Measurement of a Circle"
• "On the Sphere and Cylinder"
• "On Floating Bodies" (only known copy in Greek)
• "The Method of Mechanical Theorems" (only known copy)
• "Stomachion" (only known copy).

The palimpsest also contains speeches by the 4th century BC politician Hypereides, a commentary on Aristotle's Categories by Alexander of Aphrodisias, and other works.